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Reviews tagging 'Self harm'

Ein wenig Leben by Hanya Yanagihara

4802 reviews

challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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challenging emotional sad tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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sweetnsurly's review against another edition

DID NOT FINISH: 58%

Truly a horrendous experience. Beautifully written torture porn.

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dark emotional sad slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

This book is diabolical and so fucked. Like the more I think about the more it pisses me off and I want to say I didn’t like it, but I did. I connected so hard with the characters and it affected me really hard. I want to give it a 3.9 so a 4 it’ll be. Idk I have mixed emotions about this book.

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Maybe if the author had shown any degree of self-restraint, I might have been moved by this in the way she so clearly wants the reader to be. However, she gets so carried away with the catalogue of awful things that happen in this book that I was sat there, eyebrows raised, thinking ‘really??’ on multiple occasions. I’ll probably have more to say at a later point but right now all I can say is that this was a frustrating experience.

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challenging emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

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dark emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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dark emotional sad tense slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

five because the writing was great and it sure made me feel something

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I have many opinions on this book. I absolutely love the writing style and how paced the book is but it’s the plot that does it for me. i felt that it was super unnecessary to have Jude go through so much trauma and at times it felt like fucked up porn, but I actually really liked the book I thought it was good the first couple of chapters and even at the end.
This book will always resonate with me but I just felt some of it was unnecessary I do think that it was a good look on how trauma can affect someone through their whole life and reading about Jude’s fucked up life was hard but it also showed us how people that have gone through that get through and I hate people that hate this book because solely on the fact that Jude didn’t have a happy ending because not everyone in life has a happy ending. People that don’t like this book because of that reason have a very unrealistic look on life I get that you think life always ends happy like in a fairy tale but life doesn’t always go like that.

The reason I rate this book so low is mostly just how detailed in some sections the author went into detail especially when Jude was little into his trauma. I don’t feel it was necessary to have details of when he was being raped in the motels. That’s the reason I rate it so low but if the author did not include this it would easily for me be a 5 because this book felt so raw and emotional and I loved it seeing Jude’s friendships grow and how he grows as a person even if he always goes back to his old habits he grows a lot as a character and by the end of the book I felt like actually knew him like he was real and I just love it.

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challenging emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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